down with pants! up with skirts!

Why I Hate Animal Activists or Privileged White Kids Piss Me Off a rant by hep age 12

note #1: the above picture is not an animal rights activist.note #2: i am mostly specifically talking about fulltime animal rights *activists* not just supporters of the better treatment of animals which i am all for. the fundamentalists. note #3: yes i fully recognize all of my hypocrisy and privilege in all of this.note #4: this is mostly condensed down from an unintentional aim rant that i went off on inspired by kelis's letter back to peta. but here we go:

privilege is the whole problem with animal rights for me, she is right, it is such a white privileged activist cause. one of the reasons they infuriate me so much more than the rest, is because there is no line of division for saved animals versus ones that it is ok to oppress. if you are top of the food chain you benefit from that, end of story. it is like white privilege. you cant "un be" white. so arguing about how certain animals being "protected class" when you benefit from billions dying every day indirectly is just so much horseshit. you either live in a tree in africa, only eat leaves, and never ever get to leave it, or you are benefitting somehow from the oppression of animals even just down to reasons like you live on cleared former animal habitat, petroleum harvesting and processing extensively harms the land its on, etc.

that is why they make me so angry, it is the most infuriatingly obvious example of activist hypocrisy. like im not a big giant hypocrite about shit too but these people can't see the forest for the trees and it drives me fkn up the wall. so many of them are the rampant fundamentalists, black and white, no shades of gray, and then there are the hardliners who believe that no animals should have any human intervention at all, no pets, no work animals, no zoos, etc. but they never stop to think about the chaos that actually enacting this kind of policy would ensue. all dog breeds will not just happily go free. cows won't just adapt back to being in the wild. many predator/prey relations on all sides of the issue will be irrevocably changed, and many species would probably be lost. it would mean the dieoff of hundreds of species immediately probably altogether, but those people just dont fkn think they are so busy being self righteous. this lack of forethought, consequences, etc, is what leads to things like the many instances of peta killing and then dumping the bodies. in essence, let's punish ALL the animals so that we can have moral superiority.

and honestly, hardcore animal activism seems like the most, for lack of a better term, juvenile of causes. simply because, sure when you are 6, 7, 8, EVERYONE wants to save animals. but that is because animals are cute. and lots of children assume that every other person in the world is somehow reasonably taken care of, and that, although you hear about wars and such, or bad accidents, you assume somehow those people are looked after in some fashion, because that is "fair". then you grow up and realize, oh fuck, life isn't fair. people just like me have srsly fucked up lives, some right even here close to me. and if you hold on to your sense of empathy, then your cause caring transfers to people you can help. unless you are some spoiled trust fund kid who never had anything actually bad happen to them, so they cannot comprehend that the people who have no rights, are dying, etc, are actually sentient beings who see and feel things just as intensely.

this is not to say that no one should ever speak up on behalf of the animals, but people like the sea shepherds, alf, etc, these trustafarian full-time activists (note: activists devote 50% or more (often 100%) of their working time towards causes. not to be confused with animal rights supporters who donate small amnts of time to causes, but often money) could be out actually helping real people and making a difference in actual, for sure sentient people's lives. i am all for animals are people too, but people are people first, and there are starving people in your own towns you could be helping, if you have all that time in the world to waste trying to free a dog you are just going to put to sleep.

Yeah. Pretty much. My only disagreement is that animals, in many cases, have been made completely dependent on humans and have no real capability to return to "wildness" or develop self-reliance. Humans, on the other hand, can generally develop self reliance, or regain it.

Example:If I do not provide her an orange chenille sofa to sleep on... where will she sleep?

yeah, i was attempting to cover that with the chaos part. my chickens are another good example tho. domesticated birds are almost entirely human reliant now, and have lost a lot of their protective instincts. they just fkn climb a tree at night and go to sleep. if not for me putting them away, they would have been raccoon food years ago.

and i totally agree re: humans too, i get what you are saying. i am also all for speaking up and having a voice for the voiceless when needed, but stuff like sea shepherds fkn drives me up a wall. sure they may have saved a whale or two, but they sank their batman boat. do they think that has no bearing on the sea ecology around there? uffffffffffffff

i kno, and i agree. but so are chickens you know? and even tho i love my chickens, i will eat the shit out of them anyway. i hate the attitude that some animals are not ok to kill just because they are cute. who will speak up for the lowly termite, who has no adorable fur to stroke! hehehe

I agree and disagree. I can't stand 'militant activists' regardless of what their cause is. Nothing in life is that black and white.

Where I disagree is on the stance that their cause is somehow less important than another. It's a dangerous slope when you start to rank causes. We all feel strongly about things. I just don't like seeing people argue over who's cause is more noble. We all do what we can to shape the world into something we think is better than what it currently is.

i have a philosophy (that i think is shared by many of my activisty friends) that is something along the lines of "when all humans are free and safe and supported, we'll worry about the animals". which is not to say that i DON'T care about animals and that i don't do what i can within my life in terms of how i eat etc etc ...only that i have other things i'm fighting for first. i got really upset when someone i went to high school with (and haven't talked much to since) commented on a photo of the camel i rode in morocco for a week about the way his legs were tied. i doubt this guy has ever left ohio. the conversation looked like this:

dude: That green thing on the leg--it doesn't keep it in that position does it? Or is it just the way it looks because it's in motion?

me: yeah, the green thing kept them from wandering too far at night in the desert while we slept. they mostly just slept too, but sometimes they would get up and hop around on 3 legs a little bit.

dude: I don't like that :( obviously you don't want 'em walking away but I wouldn't want my knee tied in one position. Seems like there'd be a better way.

me: i don't love it either, although they didn't seem to mind very much. and we are talking about people who live a very tough life in the desert who have never had any education, don't have water, electricity etc. so i don't really find it my place to comment on how they handle their animals. i sort of presume they know better than i do. i also couldn't think of a better more humane way to handle it. i mean we were really in the middle of miles and miles of desert with nothing around us. you could tie them to something if there was something (sometimes there was a tree or something), but then they can't get around at all...this way they could get around slowly and find small amounts of food to graze on etc.

nothing else from him. i don't even know why i'm posting this other than i had such a terrible reaction to his comment because it SO came from such a place of privilege and judgement. which seems to relate to your post!

fundamentalists in general irritate me because they inevitably adopt an "ends justify the means" attitude in what they do. their priorities are askew. an excellent supporting point is how alf is wiling to send bomb threats to animal testing lobbies (like at my old job), but man, fuck raising money for the homeless or volunteering in a hospice -- people aren't important animals.

their tactics are also generally ineffective at convincing anyone of the merits of their philosophy (exception: the gullible). it's the old martin luther king jr. vs. malcolm x. philosophical debate: how do you convince people to change their lifestyle? with regards to vegetarianism/veganism, peta/alf thinks that by shocking people with gross-out images, throwing blood, and bombing animal research centers, it helps their causes. then you have vegetarian restaurants which offer free veggie cooking classes or whole foods and trader joes which makes meat-free options more affordable, accessible, and tasty.

one of the reasons i gave up trolling was because my efforts to get people to stop acting stupid was, at its core, me being an anti-stupid fundamentalist.